The roles of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus within the novel form what appears to be a central subtext to its narrative, which employs the village as a metaphor to discuss the fate of a whole nation or nationality.
Information like this allows us to situate the village in the province of Punjab (the region Punjab consists of several provinces, one of which is also called Punjab), which is relevant, since Punjab is an Indian province that is predominantly Sikh, as far as ethnicity and religion is concerned, and it is the conflict between Sikhs and Muslims in the year of the partition that forms the novel’s main impetus.Most of the characters onTrain to Pakistan?are, in fact, Sikh or Muslim. There are five major rivers in the region, one of which is the Sutlej, “half a mile” from Mano Majra.
Nevertheless, the most important trope, the basic constellation of the book seems clear, even more so since it’s a widely used topos in world literature.Singh’s novel is set in Mano Majra, a village in the Punjab, a border region between Pakistan and India, shared by both countries. In the absence of that in-depth knowledge, readings (such as mine) may fall short of properly assessing the power of tropes and images used by Singh. It’s hard to tell what is a distortion and what is the goal, or: the target, of that distortion or presentation. This is one of the reasons why the book is sometimes hard to read or assess for someone (like me) who may not be knowledgeable about Indian political debates in the 1950s and 60s (at all). In the latter half we flounder unhappily through Singh’s feeble attempts to hold all strands of his story together to deliver what is clearly meant to be a moving and inspiring ending to a book that isn’t shy about its intent to present the reader not just (or even primarily) with a convincing story, but with a convincing reading of history. This is not to say, however, that?Train to Pakistan?is a bad book.There is much in it that is successful, much that is interesting and even engrossing, especially in the first half of the book, which is far more compellingly told than anything in the second half. There’s no denying that Singh, who has since become a famous public figure and intellectual in India, prefers to lecture rather than write a fully coherent novel. Ideas, allusions, characters and bits and pieces of story float all over the book. Khushwant Singh, less than ten years after Partition, in 1947, wrote a novel of less than 200 pages and still managed to create what’s probably best described as an uneven mess. Train to Pakistan, originally published in 1956, is not a very good book, but quite enjoyable much of the time.